All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 31, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:44
January 31, 2012, Tuesday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Rush Limbaugh, the big vote on the right.
Losing friends and getting dumber by the day.
If you listen to the right people, the wrong people, depending on your perspective.
Another exciting hour of busy broadcast excellence hosted by me, Rush Limbaugh, meeting and surpassing.
All audience expectations.
Well, not everybody, it seems, expectations by leaps and bounds.
Telephone numbers 800-282-2882, the email address, lrushball at EIBnet.com.
Last night, I'm sorry, it was this morning on the Daily Rundown on MSNBC, Jonathan Martin, who wrote that piece, intimating what I didn't say meant.
Limbaugh didn't say it, but clearly, he sent me an email yesterday.
Okay, who's the most important conservative in Florida voting for it?
I wouldn't tell him.
So he attempted to translate what I didn't say.
He was on MSNBC this morning, had a discussion about the Florida primary and said...
I think the other reason why North Florida is going to be fascinating to watch tonight is because it's going to give us a sense of what's ahead in March.
When this primary does move to the deep south states, as you know, Chuck, a lot of those counties in the panhandle in North Florida, the cracker counties, more resemble Georgia and Alabama than they do Florida.
So it's going to be interesting to see if Romney can really show some signs of strength in and around places like Pensacola, Panama City, Tallahassee, and Jacksonville.
Okay, Cracker counties.
Now, I remember a guy named George Allen who the Washington Post ran out of politics because he called a provocateur from the enemy camp at a press conference maca, which, if you go to the Oxford English Dictionary, you cannot find maca.
It ain't there.
Nobody knows what it means.
So it was free to be defined by the left, and they defined it as a racial slur, and George Allen was his dwa.
But cracker is in the Oxford English Dictionary.
And the way it's defined is this.
A contemptuous name given in southern states of North America to the poor whites, whence familiarly the native whites of Georgia and Florida.
And Jonathan Martin just wanted to know how I, the most important cracker, the big cracker on the right, was going to vote.
No, I know I'm not a cracker.
Now, cracker probably doesn't have anything to do with race.
And in fact, on this program, we've had a lot of Floridians call when the name came up and say they were proud to be crackers.
But even though it probably doesn't have anything to do with race, it is connoted with race.
There are people who think that when you use the word, because black people do.
Louis Farrakhan, the Calypso Louie, in one of his commercials that ran on this program, referred to our staff announcer as a white cracker, Johnny Donovan.
He said, don't listen to that white cracker, John Donovan.
Order from me.
And it was about something about nine.
It might find that.
It was around the Million Man March, and Calypso Louie bought a commercial on the program.
Million Man Met.
it is this is this is where oh we don't have it yet We're getting it out of the computer roster.
We have it.
Here it is.
You may be surprised to learn that one plus one equals 19.
The secrets to this ancient mathematical system are now revealed in the Million Man Math Made Easy video system.
Do you ever wonder why things just don't add up?
And you don't understand the division?
Need answers?
Well, now there's help.
Hi, I'm Minister Louis Farrakhan.
And with my Million Man Math Made Easy, you'll be able to go through life knowing who's got your number and why.
Learn the secret about the 12 letters in Rush Limbaugh's name.
The seven so-called board members of the Federal Reserve System and what they add up to.
Learn a unique multiplication system that can turn a half a million into over two million, and that's just t-shirt sales alone.
This million man math system, stolen from our ancestors many years ago, is now available to you.
So order today.
Make sure you count.
The Million Man Math Made Easy video system available today for just $9.95.
Wait a minute.
Don't you listen to some white cracker named Johnny?
You can order it for $59.95.
Order today.
So you see, ladies and gentlemen, in that context and the Oxford English Dictionary does say that Cracker probably goes back to being a liar.
Cracker is a liar.
And so Calypso Louie would know this.
Don't listen to some white cracker named Johnny.
So anyway, there's John Autamart.
He's called white voters in North Florida crackers.
Now, I will tell you, if in any way crackers had anything to do with black people, you think Juan Williams would be sitting for it?
Juan Williams is standing for it?
A conservative who used that word to describe voters would have hell to pay.
The drive-by media would be all over a conservative, if it was a reporter, a candidate, or whatever, who referred to any voters as crackers.
Don't you know it now?
The people in the panhandle have another name, and they're far, far more proud of that name than they are Cracker.
And it's called a Redneck Riviera.
They love it up there.
They love being said.
They live Redneck Riviera, Pensacola over to Mobile, Alabama, Gulf Shores in that region is a Redneck Riviera, and they much prefer that to Cracker.
Although some people who are crackers like being called crackers, but not everybody who's a cracker likes being called a cracker.
Some people are proud of it, some of them aren't.
But I'm just telling you, you let a journalist use that name or a conservative journalist going to use that, and it is going to be hell to pay.
George Allen Macau.
Nobody knows what it is.
Now, which takes me, Juan Williams.
Juan Williams had a piece yesterday, and I had it in the stack yesterday.
I just didn't get to it.
Racial code words obscure real issues.
Wait till you hear this.
Juan Williams writing in thehill.com, who wouldn't have a job right now if it weren't for the white guy, conservative, who runs Fox News.
Because the white liberals at NPR fired him.
Was there anything racial about that?
Can I be accused of anything racial?
Because all the power people involved in that example are white.
So, okay, I'm just checking.
What am I in for later?
You think Coast is clear?
That doesn't matter.
Here's Juan Williams' piece.
Two weeks ago, at the Fox News Wall Street Journal debate in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, I asked each Republican presidential candidate some pointed questions about the racial politics that will play a big role in the election.
Race is always a trigger in politics, but now a third of the nation are people of color, and their numbers are growing with those minorities solidly in the Democrat camp.
And behind the first black president, the scene is set for a bonanza of racial politics.
The language of Republican racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message.
The code words in this game are entitlement society, as used by Mitt Romney.
That's a code word for racism.
Poor work ethic and food stamp president as used by Newt Gingrich.
Code words for racism, according to Juan Williams.
References to a lack of respect for the founding fathers and the Constitution.
Founding fathers and the word Constitution, says Juan Williams, also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anybody supposedly threatening core old-fashioned American values.
So Juan Williams is writing here that if you use the term founding fathers and constitution in a way he disapproves of, then it is racial code language.
Constitution, founding fathers, and old-fashioned American values, racial code words.
The code also extends to attacks on illegal immigrants, always carefully lumped in with illegal immigrants as people seeking amnesty and taking jobs from Americans.
That is racist as well.
But the code sometimes breaks down.
Last week, a passionate Republican told Rick Santorum, I never refer to Obama as President Obama because legally he's not president.
He constantly says our Constitution is passe and he ignores it.
He's an avowed Muslim and my question is, why isn't something being done to get him out of government?
He got no legal right to be calling himself president.
Santorum did not blink.
The man who recently said he meant blah people when the world heard him say black people as he spoke about parasitic Americans who get better lives by taking somebody else's money, did not correct the assault on the truth.
Instead, Santorum agreed that Obama is attacking the Constitution and said, well look, I'm trying my best to get him out of office.
Santorum did not follow Senator McCain's example in 2008, when a Republican called Obama an Arab.
McCain responded that, while he had policy differences with Obama, he's a decent family man and citizen.
The Myrtle Beach debate.
The question I asked Rick Perry was about the Republican push for a new voter ID law in South Carolina, a state with a history of denying black people a right to vote.
I asked Romney about his vocal opposition to parts of the DREAM Act that would give children of illegal immigrants an earned pathway to citizenship.
I asked Ron Paul about the racial disparity in our legal system with respect to enforcement of drug laws, but the question that caused the most controversy was the one I posed to Gingrich.
The former speaker has declared that black people should demand jobs instead of food stamps.
And he has proposed having poor students work as janitors in their high schools, regardless how they were intended.
Poor people, a minority, sense that with those comments, Gingrich is winking, some call it dog whistling, at certain white audiences by intimating that black people are lazy, happy to live off the government, and lacking any intellect.
You believe this?
That's not why people reacted to what Gingrich said.
People didn't react to what Gingrich said in any racial sense whatsoever, as I have exhaustively explained on this program.
What people were doing when they reacted to Gingrich was reacting to an ideology.
Gingrich was simply saying he wanted the best for these people.
He was talking about a start in life.
He was talking about a way in which they can learn the concept of working and being paid for it.
That's born of love for people.
There was nothing insulting about what Gingrich said.
You have to want to be insulted to hear it that way.
You have to be looking for racism to see it that way.
You have to be focused on that in order to be able to charge that.
That's why this is just out of control and absurd.
So this piece from Juan Williams is really an attempt to get people to shut up and stop.
It's a form of political correctness in the sense that it's an effort to get people to stop saying things which are effective.
Can you believe, ladies and gentlemen, that referring to our entitlement society is rooted in racism?
That talking about a poor work ethic is rooted in racism.
Food stamp president, rooted in racism.
No, it's rooted in a total disgust for what is being done to people, destroying their ability to be self-reliant.
The country wasn't made great by any of these things.
And certainly, when you have to dig down so deep to say that references to the founding fathers can be racial code words, that's pretty desperate.
Now, Charles Murray, an acquaintance of mine, a brilliant man, a sociologist at heart, an education expert extraordinary, has a book, fairly new book, called Coming Apart.
And in the book, Charles Murray argues that a large swath of America, poor and working class whites, is turning away from traditional values and losing ground.
And let me give you a quote.
I've got a review of the book here by Brad Wilcox at the Wall Street Journal.
And this is an interesting pull quote.
Focusing on whites.
This is about Murray and his book, Focusing on Whites in the book, to avoid conflating race with class.
Meaning, Murray focuses on whites in this book so that nobody can accuse him of being racist as a motive and thus discount what his research has found.
So he focuses exclusively on whites.
Focusing on whites to avoid conflating race with class, Mr. Murray contends that a large swath of white America, poor and working class whites, who make up approximately 30% of the white population, those people are turning away from the core values that have sustained the American experiment.
The same time, the top 20% of the white population has quietly been recovering its cultural moorings after a flirtation with the counterculture in the 60s and 70s.
Thus, argues Charles Murray in his book, the greatest source of inequality in America is now not economic, it's cultural.
He's talking about the cultural depravity that is occurring in lower middle class and poor people, and he focuses on whites to make his point so that he cannot be accused of racism and have his research and conclusions tossed out.
The dirty little secret is that doesn't matter, white, black, Indian, Muslim, whatever.
If he's talking about that socioeconomic group, the results are what they are.
And his contention is that the great inequality, the 99 versus 1, is not economic.
It's not rich versus poor.
It's those who have cultural moral roots and those who are losing them, losing their moorings, losing their ground.
It's a fabulous book, and this story about it prints out to two and a half pages.
I can give you some pull quotes from it if you're interested right now.
A timeout back after this.
Charles Murray, by the way, whose book I was recently talking about, the author of a book called The Bell Curve, and it was a book on test scores and education and how people were doing.
And it was colorblind.
It was colorblind, but it had some unfortunately factual results, but educational performance and minorities.
And it was essentially Fahrenheit 451.
They eventually burned that book out of existence.
Charles Murray, as impeccable a reputation as last week was being attached to Elliott Abrams.
Charles Murray has not one racial molecule flowing in his bloodstream nowhere.
None had ever been alleged.
He is a soft-spoken, brilliant social scientist.
And he's done tremendous work.
And the bell curve came out and he was just tied up against a wall and pelted with tomatoes.
He was tarred and feathered.
He was a racist.
So in this book, I'm not even going.
I'm just going to focus on the 30%.
What's happening to whites in terms of losing their cultural moorings?
By the way, same thing's happening in Great Britain with the lower class and poor white population there.
If you look at Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Wall Street is white.
And Occupy Wall Street is the embodiment of an entitlement mentality.
And so when Gingrich or Romney or whoever talks about the fact that we don't like and we disapprove of it, we want to end the entitlement mentality, it's every bit as much about Occupy Wall Street as it is about anybody on welfare or anybody on 200 weeks of unemployment.
We know in our hearts that's not greatness.
That doesn't lead to a great country.
That's not what made this country.
Those people are not pursuing happiness.
It's just simple.
It is the pursuit of happiness, the acknowledgement that we are all created equal, endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.
These people aren't pursuing happiness.
There's not one liberal who is.
When you get right down to it, the end of the day, it's the pursuit of happiness that leads to creativity, entrepreneurism, who knows whatever else.
And so this notion that code words, entitlement, Chris Matthews accused Gingrich of being a racist because of the way he pronounced July's name in that debate, in case you have forgotten.
You remember the story we had from last week, the Gallup Paul, Obama the most polarizing president ever.
The Washington Post has just found it.
Chris Saliza and Aaron Blake, Obama the most polarizing president ever.
He is more polarizing than even George W. Bush.
So now we should know that erasing the gap is impossible because Obama's the only one he could do it.
Remember the one, the Messiah.
Unlike anything we had ever seen in politics before, he alone could unite the peoples of this country and the peoples of the world.
And only he alone could renew the love and respect for the United States of America and blah, blah, blah.
And puke, puke, puke.
And now we have the most polarizing president.
In fact, it's so bad that in San Francisco and Oakland, in a poll, 20% of the liberal Democrats in that area have, well, the Occupy Wall Street bunch in Oakland has lost 20% of its support.
His disapproval numbers have gone up by 20% among the left in the Bay Area.
Obama, the most polarizing president ever.
For 2011, Obama's third year in orifice, an average of 80% of Democrats approved of the job he was doing, 12% of Republicans.
That's a 68-point partisan gap, the highest for any president's third year in office ever.
I'm surprised they ran the story.
As you people know, we had it last week.
The previous high was George W. Bush and his polarization gap, his partisan gap, highest in his term was 59%.
Obama, 68%, 10% higher.
And then they write this, Salizza and Blake.
While it's easy to look at the numbers cited above and conclude that Obama has failed at his mission of bringing the country together, a deeper dig into the numbers in the Gallup poll suggests the idea of erasing the gap is simply impossible.
Because if Obama couldn't do it, it can't be done.
Puke, puke, puke.
If Obama couldn't erase the partisan gap, it can't be done.
It's impossible.
Anybody check the C levels lately to see how far they've come down?
Mayor of Oakland, we announced our update today.
Jean Kwan, I call her Jean Kwan, who's the toy with her, says she's going to call the national leaders of Occupy Wall Street to ask her to call off the dogs, ask them to leave Oakland.
Why not call the White House, Mayor Kwan?
That's who's running them.
The national leaders of Occupy Wall Street are going to be found in a West Wing, by the way.
The CBO predictions that we talked about a moment ago, the unemployment number, where if you add the unemployment number or the number of unemployed and compare it to the actual number of jobs available when Obama took office, it'd be 9.5%, 9.75% unemployment.
They also gave the CBO the unquestioned in their credibility.
CBO.
Nobody ever says they're lying.
I mean, they are the coin of the realm.
You dig deep into this whole story, and the CBO gives their predictions for economic growth for this year and next.
Just sitting down.
The CBO projects growth to be 2.2% this year.
The ChiComs are growing at 9%.
Obama, in his budget of a year and a half ago, whenever he last presented a budget, projected growth of 5% by now and into infinity.
2.2% economic growth predicted this year and 1% in 2013.
An economic growth rate predicted by the CBO.
Unchallengeable.
Don't ever disagree with them.
They never lie.
1% economic growth 2013.
My gosh, if they're right about that, this is horrible.
And of course, one of the fundamental reasons for that 1% unemployment growth prediction is the implementation of Obamacare.
Ladies and gentlemen.
So that's who I am not looking forward to.
After the elections, after November, we can look forward to a 1% GDP.
That's a recession, folks.
The New York Times called 3.5% GDP a recession under Bush.
Okay, back to the phones.
We're going to go to Salt Lake City.
It's Claudia.
Claudia, thank you for calling.
Thank you for waiting.
And welcome to the EIB network.
Thanks, Rush, for taking my call.
I just want you to know, even though I've been upset with you the last couple of days, I still love you and have been listening to you since the 90s.
Let me get straight to my point.
I'm really distraught where the conservative movement has taken us, and I can understand why the Republican establishment has such disdain for Newt.
I remember back when they announced that Newt had been having an affair, and I remember how betrayed I felt.
And I remember here he was, the icon of conservatism, and yet he was acting like a liberal.
And I really do feel like it took the conservatives.
Wait, wait, wait.
Who did you hear that was the icon of conservatism?
Newt.
Newt.
Okay.
Yes, I always felt like he was the conservative icon.
Okay, so you heard you.
I'm just trying to keep up here.
You're telling me how you felt when you found out he was having affairs.
Right.
And I just felt like, I mean, they said I felt betrayed by him.
I can imagine what the Republicans at that time felt like him, you know, felt towards him.
I mean, here we are, the party of family values, and he's doing what the liberals do so often.
It was a bit hypocritical.
Yes, he was all over Clinton's case for essentially.
But Newt has said that he wasn't criticizing Clinton for the sex.
I realize that.
But then you go back, then you go to today, and he's trashing capitalism.
And that's a huge thing.
That's a big conservative statement.
And so now it seems like to me that we're saying, okay, none of that matters because his rhetoric is so good, and he's such a good debater.
So we won't worry about the capitalism thing.
And that's just kind of how it's felt to me.
Like the last few days, we've just kind of swept it all under the rug.
Well, you know, the same thing is happening with the Romney campaign.
Those people are saying, well, you know, we'll forget about Romney Carr.
It's not really the same.
We'll forget that Romney called himself a moderate.
We'll forget that Romney really doesn't like they made it a point of saying in Massachusetts he wasn't a Reagan conservative.
I mean supporters of both these guys are having to say, you know what, we're going to ignore that.
Well, I agree with that, except for when Newt was asked who his favorite president was, he says it's FDR.
And I just don't understand if you are supporting Reagan, why you'd say your favorite president was FDR.
You know, I know.
Each one of them is blind.
We don't understand why he'd sit on a couch with Pelosi for any reason.
Not mention global warming, but why?
And then what about Paul Ryan?
I mean, do you believe in and he's running on, well, we want to get this budget under control.
Now, let me tell you about that.
Let me let me I can explain the right-wing social engineering comment.
I assume that's what you're referring to.
Yes.
I really, I'm looking, I'm going to catch hell for this.
I can't say a thing here without half people hearing it wish I was dead.
That was just jealousy.
Paul Ryan was getting accolades.
Paul Ryan, everybody on our side, because what Ryan's budget did was effectively come with the first serious, effective plan to deal with all these problems and entitlements.
And he was being celebrated all over the place.
And a lot of other Republicans were jealous of that.
They want those accolades.
They think their ideas are just as good, and their ideas were ignored.
And I'm giving you their mindset here.
I'm not saying that that's happened.
I'm just saying what they're thinking.
So I think there was just a tinge of jealousy going on there.
So it comes out with right-wing social engineering as a means of dismissing it.
Well, I can understand that.
I'm not defending it.
I'm just trying to explain it to you.
And I'm not trying to justify it either.
Right, but it just feels like, it just feels like because he's such a good debater, which he is, and because he can explain conservatism and he has done a fabulous job.
I'm not going to deny that.
But I just think the bigger picture is, you know, capitalism, that's huge.
And to go around and pound it to every state and say, you know, we'll give you this, we'll give you the moon, kind of basically, and, you know, all these things.
Okay, Mrs. Romney.
That's right.
Romney came out.
That was one of his debate points to the last debate, that you can't run around and just tell everybody everything what they want to hear.
That's not what presidents do.
He really, in Newt's defense, hey, you know, I think it's important for presidential candidates to come into a state and have the people there know what's important to them and what's going on here.
I remember that back and forth.
All right.
Claudia, thanks much.
I understand.
You're a Romney girl and upset that I'm not.
Upset I'm not a Romney girl.
Romneyite.
Romney.
I understand that.
You know, folks, I'm always the first guy picked to be on a team.
Everybody wants me on their team.
I understand.
No one didn't admit anything.
Didn't admit a thing.
Hi, welcome back, Rushlin Boy.
Half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
There's even more in the latest CBO report.
The amount of money the federal government takes out of the U.S. economy in taxes will increase by more than 30% between 2012 and 2014, according to the budget and economic outlook published today by the CBO.
Now, look at what we've learned from the CBO just today.
We've learned that the real unemployment rate is 10%.
If the same number of jobs were available today as were available when Obama took office, the real unemployment rate would be 10%.
We have learned that economic growth is forecast to be 2.2% this year and 1% next year.
And now the CBO says that taxes will go up by more than 30% over the next two years.
Scheduled taxes, not just income taxes.
And this is why the economy will grow at 2.2% this year and 1% next year.
In particular, between 2012 and 2014, revenues in CBO's baseline shoot up by more than 30%, mostly because of the recent or scheduled expirations of tax provisions, such as those that lower income tax rates and limit the reach of the alternative minimum tax.
Now, along these lines, for the longest time, I remember citing an essay, a piece from a brilliant thinker at the Heritage Foundation who explained very succinctly why stimulus doesn't work, why government stimulus doesn't, because if you're going to stimulate the private sector with money, you first have to take the money out of the private sector.
If you're going to inject $800 billion in the private sector, you first have to take it away from them.
The money doesn't exist elsewhere.
Unless you print it, then we're talking distortion of reality anyway.
Another piece has come along by a couple of professors.
One of them is a UC San Diego professor Valerie Ramey.
She's got a report here along with Christopher Nicarta, new National Bureau of Economic Research study, the NBER.
And they found that private spending falls significantly in response to an increase in government spending.
They found, secondly, that increases in government spending lowers unemployment through an increase in government employment, not private employment.
So for the most part, this is her conclusion.
It appears that a rise in government spending does not stimulate private spending.
And the Heritage Foundation guy said it can't.
It's not possible.
A rise in government spending does not stimulate private spending.
Keynes was all wet.
He didn't know what he was talking about.
Most estimates suggest that government spending significantly lowers private spending.
These results imply that the government spending multiplier is below unity, which is one.
In other words, there's no such thing as government stimulus of the private sector.
Cannot happen.
Government spending does more harm than good to the private sector economy.
You're not going to see this report in the drive-by media.
It's common sense.
It's economic common sense.
Now, in this CBO story I just read, the 30% tax is going up, the reason economic growth in 2013 is 1%.
I think the CBO just called the health care mandate a tax, which is what Obama would love for it to be called.
That would make it constitutional.
Well, I don't care what they call it.
Bottom line is that government spending, government revenue, tax increases, is going to continue to starve the private sector.
And that, my friends, is by design.
That is not incompetence.
It's not being in over his head.
It is purposeful.
You simply can't, when the government's sole source of revenue, outside printing it or borrowing it from the Chikoms, when the sole source of revenue for the government is taxing the output of the private sector, how does it make any sense to put $800 billion into the private sector that can only come from the private sector in the first place?
It's not as though there's $800 billion lying around not being used.
You and I both know, we know we're $16 trillion in debt.
We don't have $800 billion laying around.
There isn't $800 billion idle, not doing anything that we can grab.
So, you know what?
We're going to put it in the private sector.
Can't happen.
And even if that kind of money did exist that was idle, how can the government put it in the private sector and stimulate anything?
It can't.
All it can do is choose winners and losers.
And Obama did.
It was the unions and public sector jobs.
All those shovel-ready jobs didn't exist, laughed about them later.
All this is a giant lie, not to mention joke, on us.
All right.
I got to take a brief time out here, my friends.
I'll rush you all to another obscene profit timeout.
But we'll be back before you know it.
The great columnist Michelle Mulkin has endorsed Rick Santorum in a lengthy piece that she posted yesterday.
And she, I can share with you elements of it when we get back, perhaps.
And we got lots of other things.
I want to spend a little bit more time on Charles Murray's new book.
Fascinating stuff.
And of course, what would the show be without you ripping me apart on the phones?
▲
Export Selection